Joking about OCD

I found this blog article at http://www.incertus.imntb.com/2005/06/08/not-a-joke/. You don't need wo click on the link. I was just posting it to give the blogger credit. Here is the article:

There really is nothing funny about OCD. Though, if you have OCD you do have to admit that some of our behaviors are, well, odd. And I guess I have come to a place where I can laugh at myself, some of the times. And usually only in retrospect. Hard to laugh in the midst of hell.
I know a lot of folks with OCD get pretty upset when people make all those casual jokes about OCD. And rightly so. There is nothing funny about destroyed lives, all that lost potential that is wasted away on repetitive closed loop fear. Though I do laugh sometimes when watching Monk and I remember I almost literally fell out of my chair laughing when Jack Nicholson got the Oscar for As good as It Gets and he put his hand in a plastic bag to take the statue. Still cracks me up. But not everyone in the OCD world thought that was funny.
I don’t know what it is but it is still acceptable in our culture to make jokes about mental illness to a degree that you do not see with other illnesses. And I think behind a lot of those jokes is your basic fear response. Something frightens you or makes you uneasy, you joke and it lightens that load. And joking about that kind of thing is pretty much human nature but society as a whole needs to learn about mental illness. Needs to learn a whole lot. We didn’t choose this you know.
The one thing I see a lot more of then jokes is the trivializing of OCD. Do a web search for weblogs referencing OCD and you will find thousands of entries were people talk about being OCD about a particular thing. And all they are talking about is being a little obsessive about this that or the other thing. Nothing even remotely close to OCD. That bugs me a bit. It just makes it an overused and incorrectly used word. Like depression. Most people say they are depressed when they mean they are sad. Try a real depression sometime. Sadness in nothing by comparison.
I don’t know where I am going with this, so I will stop now with this. There is nothing funny about mental illness but if you are lucky you can be mentally ill and still laugh at yourself.
It’s OK to do that you know.

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